Violence endogène et portées sociales d'une catastrophe écologique: corps individuels, corps sociaux dans l'aprés Katrina. – Katrina-NOLA

ENDOGENOUS VIOLENCE AND SOCIAL EFFECTS OF ECOLOGICAL DISASTERS: INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL BODIES AFTER KATRINA - - - This project aims to analyse the reach of forms of social violence that are inherent to ecological catastrophes. Its empirical object is Katrina, the catastrophe (hurricane, flooding, explosions, fires, oil spills, etc.) that affected over a million inhabitants of the New Orleans area. We will examine these forms of violence through the theoretical lens of pragmatism, and in particular the notion of emerging publics (as conceptualized by John Dewey) and their effect on a series of tensions created by the catastrophe and its aftermath. Drawing on the area of disaster studies (Oliver-Smith, Erikson, etc.) and the sociology of contemporary risks (Beck, Callon, Gibert, etc.), this project will emphasize the temporal depth of the catastrophe and the imbrications of its violence with urban processes and their agents, or embodied subjects. - - Contrary to approaches that analyse the effects of disaster through the perspective of pre-existing structural violence that is then either revealed or triggered by the catastrophe, this study will focus on forms of violence inherent to the catastrophic event and its wake. The social dimension of catastrophic violence will be examined through two complementary facets: - - 1) Its cause (insofar as human agency can be imputed in the chain of catastrophic events). A first hypothesis is that under conditions of technologically advanced societies, this socially determined aspect of violence is immediately transformed into a moral violence. Unlike symbolic violence, which is masked and misrecognized (Bourdieu 1998), moral violence is openly experienced within a register of shared values (ethics of aid, the right to return, equitable access to post-catastrophe resources, etc.), defines the norms of acceptability of responses, and exacts such forms as apologies, reparation, and redemption for the assaults to human dignity. The nature of this violence will be apprehended through the publics that are constituted around the demands for justification, as well as through individual narratives, which themselves can create ties between their authors and the emerging publics of which they may eventually become a part. - 2) The social nature of its effects. Regardless of its cause, the catastrophe is experienced en masse, by a multitude of actors who are aware that what has happened to them also happened to others (albeit in unequal fashion). Thus they constitute both one body and several collective bodies. At the same time, the disruptive effects of the shock and of its responses unfold through a series of trials, or practical experiences, which the inhabitants must confront. These shock waves, carried along individual trajectories, may nevertheless differ according to the extent and type of damages sustained. The catastrophe leaves in its wake sediments of shared experience (and hence foundations for joining together with others) and fault lines (principles of opposition) between those experiences. Our hypothesis is that the legacy of violence and the way in which it is reacted to, contribute to both linking and unlinking the nodes constitutive of social life. Our goal is to examine these reconfigurations and their logics. - - The specific object of the study will be the domains of health and urban life, by tracing the effects of violence on both: that of bodies and that of the contexts in which they live. But each (health goods and urban goods) repeats in its own way the initial moral violence, the first around the issue of the lack of assistance, the second through the broken contract (a commitment which never mobilizes the resources to allow it to live up to its own standards). In both areas, the study will solicit narratives of the experiences of the catastrophe to examine how (and if) the sequences of trials they undergo lead them towards emerging publics. The data gathered through i